~EDWARD BYRNE~
EXQUISITE
MUSIC: JOHN BALABAN'S
PATH, CROOKED
PATH
When readers encounter
John Balaban’s poetry,
they usually believe the
words have been fashioned
by a thoughtful and
compassionate man who
himself
may have survived a number of
life’s toughest
tests
or
witnessed others endure some
of the severest
circumstances humans must
face, whether as a
consequence of
the death and destruction associated
with war or arising from another form of loss.
For more than three decades John Balaban
has been providing readers of contemporary poetry with intelligent yet
accessible works that display insight into one individual’s
perspectives on important issues of intellect and emotion, including
those largest of topics—love and war, life and loss, joy and suffering,
human culpability and moral responsibility. Often combining the private
and the public, Balaban writes lines that frequently seem intimate,
poetry filled with scenes depicting engaging experiences and personal
observations, while at the same time guiding readers with information
that helps define current conditions influencing the author and the
lives of those around him, as well as all of us who wish to carefully
consider similar situations or shared concerns about the world in which
we find ourselves.
Balaban’s poems at times appear to be the products
of a conscience in conflict, caught between what the speaker believes
is correct or principled behavior and circumstances that present a
competing reality tempting one to accept easier, more expeditious and
expedient actions as alternatives. When readers encounter John
Balaban’s poetry, they usually believe the words have been fashioned by
a thoughtful and compassionate man who himself may have survived a
number of life’s toughest tests or witnessed others endure some of the
severest circumstances humans must face, whether as a consequence of
the death and destruction associated with war or arising from another
form of loss. Indeed, John Balaban’s initial reputation as a poet flows
from those first pieces composed in response to his stint in Vietnam as
a conscientious objector who nevertheless requested an alternate
assignment in the war zone as a volunteer aiding civilians wounded or
displaced by the combat around them.
Consequently, when confronted by the casualties of
war, both emotional and physical, including an instance of his own
wounding by shrapnel, Balaban discovered he possessed an ability to
express even the harshest of situations in lyrical language that evokes
empathy for war’s victims or initiates meditative musings on the causes
and conduct of war. These characteristics were evidenced in some of his
earlier poems. For instance, in “After Our War” Balaban begins
with a litany of horror: “After our war, the dismembered bits / —all
those pierced eyes, ear slivers, jaw splinters, / gouged lips, odd
tibias, skin flaps, and toes— / came squinting, wobbling, jabbering
back.” However, by the poem’s closing lines, these specifics of
physical
damage give way to more philosophical questions that haunt the speaker
just as much as the images of the wounded and dead, including the final
question posed by the speaker as he wonders: “After our war, how will
love speak?”
Elsewhere, delivering an address in the form of an
elegy for a woman with whom he once worked, Balaban reports:
We brought to better care the
nearly lost,
the boy burned by white
phosphorous, chin
glued to his chest; the scalpel
girl;
the triple amputee from the
road-mined bus;
the kid without a jaw, the one
with no nose.
You never wept in front of them,
but waited
until the gurney rolled them into
surgery.
I guess that’s what amazed me
most.
Why didn’t you fall apart or quit?
[“Thoughts Before Dawn”]
John Balaban’s skill at confronting in his poetry
the horrific incidents and general inhumanity that accompany any war
could be traced to his strongly held convictions and his admirable
actions, including his activities as a field representative in Vietnam
for the Committee of Responsibility to Save War-Injured Children. In
the title poem from Words for My
Daughter Balaban is reminded of an instance in Vietnam when he
assisted surgeons caring for wounded civilians. He recalls “from a
cloud of memories / still drifting off the South China Sea”:
. . . the 9-year-old boy, naked
and lacerated,
thrashing in his pee on a steel
operating table
and yelling “Dau. Dau,” while I, trying to
translate
in the mayhem of Tet for surgeons
who didn’t know
who this boy was or what had
happened to him, kept asking
“Where? Where’s the pain?” until
a surgeon
said “Forget it. His ears
are blown.”
However, perhaps what has repeatedly surprised and
satisfied readers about Balaban’s poetry is his seemingly resilient
spirit, which continues to look for good and express hope for the
future. As he advised his daughter, as well as his readers, in
the final stanza of “Words for My Daughter,” his goal appears to be
alerting all to the darker parts of human existence in order to prepare
that they might find a way through to the light of kindness
that also exists: “I want you to know the worst and be free from it. /
I want you to know the worst and still find good.”
Balaban’s language usually indicates a yearning for
an ultimate faith in future possibilities, a hope for the next
generation’s acknowledgments of evil’s presence even while seeking a
more beneficent society. This poet — who has experienced the awfulness
of
war — seems to need to believe in such an optimistic forecast of a
positive outcome, perhaps desires to find comfort thinking of such a
consequence. As the closing lines voiced by the speaker in “Words for
My Daughter” suggest: “I suspect I am here less for your protection /
than you are here for mine, as if you were sent / to call me back into
our helpless tribe.”
With the publication in 2003 of Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New &
Selected Poems, a wonderful volume in which Balaban thematically
organized pieces from his previous collections with more than two dozen
new poems sprinkled among them, he seemed to have reached a point of
completion. The generous array of poetry in this book represented
a culmination of thirty years’ worth of work, material that presented a
compelling profile of the poet and hinted at the different direction
his writing was moving. Balaban’s new poetry showed readers and
critics who may have pigeonholed him merely as a Vietnam poet that his
sensitivity and appreciation of others’ lives extended beyond the
narrow focus some devoted to his war poems when evaluating his literary
contributions. Certainly, Balaban’s past poetry had amply
demonstrated why his work should be regarded among the finest arising
from the Vietnam War and its aftermath. However, with some of the
newer items in this collection, Balaban proved that he already had
begun to expand his artistic vision, as he also displayed his expertise
in examining a variety of subjects.
In “Anna Akhmatova Spends the Night on Miami Beach,”
a poem that would be reprinted in Path,
Crooked Path, appearing as part of a suite of elegiac pieces set
in Miami, and perhaps serve as a bridge between the two books, Balaban
affirms the authority of art, particularly its ability to transcend
countries’ borders and cultural identities. The speaker discovers
a paperback of Akhmatova’s poetry left lying overnight on a bench in
Miami beach, its “pages / a bit puffy by morning, flushed with
dew.” On the back cover a photograph from the 1930s pictures “her
in spangled caftan.” Halfway around the world and more than three
decades after her death, “at the end of the American century,”
Akhmatova — a poet who also wrote of the effects of war — lives in the
language of her poetry as Balaban personifies the book with its author
longing “for the one person in ten thousand / who could say her name in
Russian, / who could take her home, giving her a place / next to Auden
and Apollinaire, / to whom she could describe her night’s excursion.”
An epigraph from Plutarch that introduces “Looking
Out from the Acropolis, 1989,” another poem reprinted from Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New &
Selected Poems, reiterates the ability of even ancient art or
architecture to endure and reinvigorate: “Each structure, in its
beauty, was even then and at once antique, but in the freshness of its
vigor, even today, recent and newly wrought.” The poet himself
reports being amazed by the remains, “awed / by the lonely grace of
stones fallen, stones still standing.”
Nevertheless, the poet knows the ravages and human
suffering caused by civilizations in conflict throughout the centuries
since those stones were erected, and the poem chronicles a number of
such events: “Yugoslavian slaughter”; “the breadlines in Moscow, the
dead rivers and lakes”; “Chechens, Kurds, Azeris et al. / went for
their guns to settle old scores”; “Israeli rubber bullets and intifada
stones”; “Bloated African bellies, fly-infested eyes”; “the Japanese,
baptized in nuclear fire.” Gazing around him, accompanied by
another poet, the speaker declares: “These old stones cry out for
more.” Perhaps echoing the sentiment of Plutarch, Balaban
comments in the poem’s final stanza:
Surviving centuries, sculpted for
all to see,
declaring our need for beauty and
laws like love
for this tiny polis of a planet
spinning wildly,
for my daughter, snug, asleep in
her bed.
The poem closes as the pair of poets offer a toast
with drinks of vodka from a flask “to the new world order / and to
whatever muse might come to give us words.” Once again, the
speaker’s contemplation culminates in a search for words, poetry that
might comfort or provide guidance toward a more hopeful future.
As the author notes in the opening lines of “Varna
Snow,” dedicated in memory of poet Roland Flint (as is the entire book,
which begins with an epigraph from Flint’s “Varna Snow”):
A breeze riffles in off the beach
stirring poplar catkins, wooly
stuff
drifting the town in flurries,
searching
the air like syllables of poetry
while
we perch on the stones of this
Roman bath
listening to poetry, the delicate
thing which lasts.
After a long litany of empires and military
powers — “Greek and Roman, Getae, Thracian, Bulgar, / Slavs, Avars,
Goths, Celts, Tatars, Huns, / Arabs, Turks, Russian, and, now, the U.S.
Navy” — who have controlled the region throughout the centuries,
Balaban
concludes this poem, which concerns the “aging Ovid, exiled by
Augustus,” with this most telling last pair of sentences: “But now,
acacias / fragrance our evening as poplar fluff drifts / through
imperial rubble. Only poetry lasts.”
The perceived value of poetry and poets,
particularly in contemporary American culture, appears as a primary
subject in “The Lives of the Poets.” This poem is headed by an epigraph
from Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift,
which proclaims the nation “is proud of its dead poets,” then continues
to remark how the reality of America may be too large and overpowering
for poets: “So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make
it here.” Intermingling other quotes from the pages of Bellow’s
novel, Balaban references memories of a multitude of poets in the
roster included among the work’s stanzas: Denise Levertov, Allen
Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, James Wright, Carolyn Kizer,
Lew Welch, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath,
Anne Sexton, Delmore Schwartz, Maxine Kumin, William Meredith, Hayden
Carruth, Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder. Listing a
number of evocative instances reminiscent of poets Balaban has known
and admired, he again argues the importance of poets and poetry,
suggesting the art will outlive its creators and continue into the
future. As he has noted previously, poetry is “the delicate thing
which lasts.” Indeed, “only poetry lasts”; thus, the value of
poets and poetry probably cannot be determined in current terms.
The poem ends with a metaphor for the resilience and
revitalization supplied by art, particularly poetry, over time.
Walking with Carolyn Kizer’s husband across their farm, Balaban
recounts: “we stopped before a storm-struck, twisted pear tree, / a
remnant from an orchard of 100 years ago. / Out of the hulk of its
blackened trunk, / one smooth-skinned branch sent forth some
leaves.” Observing this, Balaban turns to his host and asks,
“Still blooming?” The answer he receives: “Madly.” The
perseverance of poetry over a long period of time also becomes most
apparent in the recurring presence of Ovid as a figure throughout the
poems in Path, Crooked Path.
Balaban translates a bit of Ovid and Ovid’s poetry provides epigraphs
for some poems, while it is cited in others, and stories of Ovid supply
context in additional pieces.
Yet, John Balaban’s poetry also remains as
distinctly American as any Walt Whitman work would, especially in a
couple of poems concerning travel across the country (“Highway 61
Revisited” and “Driving Back East with My Father”). “Highway 61
Revisited,” the terrific opening poem for the collection, immediately
calls to mind the idealized images of freedom associated with cruising
across the countryside on this legendary road, as well as its iconic
presence in the Bob Dylan song. In a piece that may be as
poignant as any about the aftermath of 9/11, Balaban leaves the heat of
summer in the city during June following the World Trade Center atacks,
feeling pulled toward the open road:
. . . I sped by, heading out
once more for the heart of the
heart of the country,
rolling down Highway 61, heading
West and South,
lighting out again, away from
fanfare and drumbeats,
the couples holding hands in
their slow-motion leaps
from the skyscraper windows
billowing smoke.
Along the way, the speaker describes how he feels
almost as if he’s escaped, “lost” among the rural surroundings: “In
midwestern farmlands rustling wheatcrowns, / spreading out with alfalfa
and sorghum, sprouting corn, / I thought I was lost, in the crickets
and songbirds.” However, an incident along his journey quickly
brings back to him the difficulties and dark tone of the nation that he
seems to be attempting to distance from himself:
when I picked up the soldier
mugged in the bus station,
teeth kicked in, wallet taken,
hitching back to base in Waco
to his tank-repair unit readying
for another Iraq war
I knew I was on the right road,
running like a lifeline
across the palm of America.
Farther along, pausing for gas while traveling over
the Texas landscape, the speaker hears a cry for help, and he discovers
“an elderly man in a battered Honda, door open, / big shoes planted on
the greasy cement, looking at me.” Balaban reveals the man needs
assistance lifting his prosthetic legs into the car, and when asked
where he is going, the old man “just pointed his finger like a gun,
said, / ‘That way, down Highway 61.’” Alluding to another poet,
the speaker confides his choice to follow “a less traveled blacktop
running south,” and he aims his auto toward the Mexican border, most of
America in his rearview mirror. There, it “is the summer solstice
and I am with friends / in this high-desert border town rumbled by
freight trains.” Watching the moon poised above the Sierra
Madres, the poet details its illumination and the mood of the nation:
shining on the humble folk wading
into Texas,
shining on the Border Patrols, on
the DEA blimp,
shining on the bright empty
ribbon of Highway 61,
loud with strange cries echoing
across America.
In the other poem derived from a drive across the
country, “Driving Back East with My Dad,” Balaban offers an elegy for
his father, remembered from a photograph in which he “squinted / at the
camera, baseball cap over his long white hair. / Seventy-five, and
about to ride 2,000 miles in my old pickup.” During the poem
Balaban narrates his adventurous father’s life story, perhaps that
crooked path that stretches like a line across one’s palm. The
father was born in Romania and immigrated at the age of 21 knowing
“scarcely a word of English.” He was a man who in World War II
“invented the C130 ‘Flying Boxcar’” and led a walkout from a restaurant
when “a black draftsman” with whom he worked would not be served.
However, the speaker reveals an estrangement that
apparently developed since leaving home at age 16 following another
“punch-up” with his father. Therefore, as they travel along the road,
the silence between them is most likely not surprising: “I can’t say we
said much on our drive, / a mere detour on his long crooked
path.” In fact, at one point during the trip, as they move
through a pounding hailstorm, the father even turns off his hearing
aid. Thus, Balaban believes he cannot credibly provide in his
poem a desired uplifting ending marked by reconciliation and emotional
expression between the two men. However, the truth Balaban does
offer may be far more important:
How I wish for a lyric ending to
this prose tale:
a moment when the travelers,
going in the direction
they faced, found they had
already arrived. Still,
it was good, being alive
together, taking the road,
mindful of where we had come, and
moving on.
Much of Path,
Crooked Path appears elegiac, filled with farewells, as in “The
Goodbyes,” which starts with a lyric from Trent Reznor’s “Hurt,”
notably sung by Johnny Cash: “Everyone I know / Goes away in the end.”
In this poem the speaker lists loved ones lost, sometimes to death,
other times to the changes brought about by time — “both the dead and
alive / Who we will never see again but in dream and memory”—including
a likely reference to the
father in “Driving Back East with My Dad”:
Dead parents, good or bad,
dwelling in terminal silence.
Ex’s living in Ohio with someone
you’ve never met.
Past lovers, old friends, homes
you had, last replies.
Lips you kissed, would kiss
again. Children grown and gone.
This is our harder trial; these,
our bleakest times:
Not our own going, but the going
of others.
These closing lines again remind one of Whitman, who
wrote in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” that the dead “were
fully at rest, they suffer’d not, / The living remained and
suffer’d.” Once more, Balaban’s poetry seems to explain and
exemplify the need for art, particularly poetry, that allows our
memories of those no longer in our lives to persist.
Likewise, in the final poem of Path, Crooked Path, “The Great
Fugue,” John Balaban presents another poem in memory of those who once
mattered so significantly in his life. Balaban honors those who,
like his art teacher and her husband, took him in and guided him when
he left home as a 16-year-old runaway: “Taken in by teachers, I became
their project.” Hired by other teachers to work odd jobs so that
he “had a little cash,” the young Balaban also receives a separate
education, a fondness for reading and the arts:
My civics teacher pushed me hard
in class.
At school, she would not let me
sulk; at her home
she paid me to alphabetize her
books and records,
all of it a ruse to get them in
my hands.
Balaban reports how he was led by one mentor from
author to author, book by book: Homer, Tennyson, Joyce, Kazantzakis,
etc. However, when he asked to hear Grosse Fugue by the Budapest String
Quartet, he was informed his hosts only play it on Easter each
year. By the final stanza of the poem, the poet notes an absence,
people and places now lost except to his memory:
Now that lovely farmland is
mostly turned to malls.
The woods behind my boyhhod
house—where I found
arrowheads, box turtles, musket
balls, and, once,
a bayonet from the Revolutionary
War—all are gone.
My wise elders are long
dead. Today is Easter.
Therefore, the speaker plays “the Grosse Fugue, hearing / the faded
voices of those good people,” and Balaban concludes this book again
with an elegiac mood, using his poetry as a way to remember and somehow
preserve the relationships that initiated his interests in literature
and music, perhaps the people most responsible for his becoming a poet:
who did not want to see me
falter, but took me in,
schooling me in an intertwining
of spirits
that like music can fill a room,
that is a great fugue
weaving through us and joining
generations
in charged, exquisite music that
we long to hear.
Maybe due to misconceptions that have limited some
views about his work, known mostly for his poems about Vietnam or his
translations of Vietnamese folk poetry, John Balaban’s greater range
and his ability to address a wider array of experiences or subject
matter may hve been overlooked by some readers in the past.
However, with Path, Crooked Path
Balaban confirms to all he possesses a continuing ability to confront
different topics, public or personal, filled with difficult emotional
overtones or fraught with ambiguity. John Balaban carefully
chronicles the crooked path of life with gratitude for those who had
enhanced his journey, as well as a sense of sorrow with the loss felt
by their passing. By preserving memories of the individuals and
incidents that enriched his life with his elegiac lines, readers also
are enriched.
The poet wisely praises the moments of joy life
might offer, yet with regret at the pain so many have had to endure,
especially those whose lives have been burdened the most, as in
“Eddie,” another of the collection’s elegiac poems, about a paralyzed
panhandler killed “by a truck running the light, crushed / into his
wheelchair.” When the speaker’s wife suggests the man may be
“better off dead,” the poet replies:
. . . I don’t know.
Behind his smudged glasses
his eyes were clever. He
had a goofy smile
but his patter was sharp.
His legs were a mess
and he had to be lonely.
But spending days
in the bright fanfare of traffic
and
those nights on his beach, with
the moon
huge in the palm trees, the
highway quiet,
some good dreams must have come
to him.
Balaban’s willingness to recognize human hardship
and to catalog horror while also holding a desire to find hope for the
future fuels his poetry. As he once advised, he wants us to know
the worst as a way that we may be free from it. He wants us to
know the worst but be able to find good. He typifies this
attitude when he writes with sympathy amid a Miami evening scented by
orchids to Hayden Carruth, in whose colder northern climate “bleeding
heart trembles in Isabel’s garden” (“A Note to Hayden Carruth from
Miami”): “beyond your daughter’s death, beyond folly, / beyond fame,
beyond indignation and pain, / toasting the first life in small things
/ fresh from the earth with their tentative yes.” Balaban has followed
this crooked course accepting pain and acknowledging pleasure
throughout his life and particularly through his poetry, perhaps
acknowledging always that poetry is “the delicate thing which
lasts.” Thankfully, once again in Path, Crooked Path John Balaban
continues to provide “the exquisite music we long to hear.”
Balaban, John. Path,
Crooked Path.
Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2006. ISBN: 1-55659-238-8
$15.00
© by Edward Byrne
